Tax
Tax me more, but don’t touch my dishwasher
There was a big fuss a year or so ago about a book by a French chap called Piketty about…
Mr Bear is back: sit tight because he may be with us for a while
Like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, we’ve just been savaged by a bear but we’ll probably survive. Leading UK-listed stocks…
Bad driving
From ‘The Conscription of Wealth’, The Spectator, 22 January 1916: At recent race meetings streams of motor-cars have proceeded from…
How far can Bernie Sanders go?
Could the socialist senator of Vermont be on track to win the Democratic nomination?
Trouble brewing
Indian magnate Nirmal Sethia on what the English get wrong about tea – and the other countries seeking to recruit our discontented non-doms
French Notebook
An overnight stop on the Ile de Ré taken between the St Malo ferry and the Quercy, where we always…
Mansion migrants
The super-rich can shrug off Labour’s big tax idea. People like me will be forced out
Cheap shots and uncosted bribes are drowning out vision, wisdom and optimism
The interesting thing about Labour’s pledge to abolish non-dom tax status — a squib designed to trap Tories into expressing…
The Miliband agenda
There will be tax rises to suit every taste. But the people he’s expecting to pay will probably just leave
State of the arts
The season of cringe-making acceptance speeches at arts awards ceremonies is nearly over, thank heavens. But it hasn’t passed without…
High life
Athens I am walking on a wide pedestrian road beneath the Acropolis within 200 meters of the remaining Themistoclean wall…
Just in time, Osborne answers Labour’s 50p tax trick with a bumper monthly surplus
Last week’s public borrowing and tax-receipt figures, headlined ‘Chancellor hails biggest monthly surplus in seven years’, received considerably less attention…
Green must answer for HSBC’s faults — but he’s another victim of big banking’s perils
Stephen Green — the former trade minister Lord Green of Hurstpier-point, who became this week’s political punchbag— was always a…
Everywhere should be more like Essex
Apart from the Wye Valley, where I grew up, there are only two places in Britain I’d consider living: Kent…
Why my friends love the idea of a nasty, stupid mansion tax
I see all the flaws with a mansion tax, I really do. And yet some little piece of me, some…
Will Osborne’s tilt against Double Dutch tax dodgers play into Farage’s hands?
George Osborne’s promise to crack down on multinational companies’ avoidance of UK taxes by the use of impenetrable devices such…
Barometer
Tough at the top The clocks on Big Ben were cleaned by abseiling window-cleaners. Some other big cleaning/painting jobs: —…
Liberté, égalité, austérité
How France learned to love cuts
Rome’s student politics
Foreign students getting on to courses under false pretences, overstaying their welcome and so on are nothing new. Ask the Romans.…
The Spectator’s Notes
Our neighbour Philip Merricks is a farmer on Romney Marsh, 90 per cent of whose land is below sea level.…
Alex Salmond’s economic policies would drive an independent Scotland into the ground
Within the white paper on economic policy in an independent Scotland that was published by Alex Salmond’s government this week…
A mansion tax that monkeys would understand
I am surprised no more attention has been given to Martin Vander Weyer’s suggestion in The Spectator two weeks ago…
What Vodafone should do with its huge windfall: invest it in the next Vodafone
Vodafone, which has just collected an £84 billion windfall from the sale of its 45 per cent stake in Verizon…
A touch of class
Usually it is annoying when you have to board an aeroplane via a shuttle bus rather than an airbridge. The…
Detroit’s bankruptcy isn’t ‘creative destruction’ – it’s old-fashioned mismanagement
One of the best articles I ever commissioned as an editor was an account by James Doran of a road…
